DTC #109: Building a lean marketing team in Singapore

Starting a business in Singapore is a breeze. Sustaining and scaling is tragically difficult. First, talent is unavailable and expensive. Second, market is saturated. Let's solve for talent.

👋 Holaaaaaa! Welcome to Out of Singapore. I am Shan. I write about building and scaling businesses. Currently you will hear about consumer brands. I will share about new projects as and when they come.

Folks, this is the 52nd post of this newsletter. One full year worth of writing!

I am so proud of the consistency. Regarding the quality - you are the best judge. I enjoy being criticised. Please write to me if you liked or disliked. It allows me to improve. Write nasty emails, hahah. 🫠

Anyone across the world can set up a new business in Singapore from their laptop or phone. That’s were the easy things stop. The next phase of building a team from Singapore is possibly the toughest.

Some folks may complain about the small market size. I do not agree. The market is essentially as big as any other large country. Purchasing power is as strong as USA or UK. Consumers are willing to try new brands (albeit with Asian habits of heckling). However, this would be a topic for another blog post. Let’s talk about talent today.

We will cover

1. Singapore’s talent problem

2. Lean model that works well for us

3. How can lean team become effective?

Please note that I talk from the perspective of small sized startups (bootstrapped or upto seed stage funding). I mean no disrespect. These are my own experience with building a team. I am happy to be corrected.

First, what is a good talent?

1. Affordable for the respective business and it’s size (cost).

2. Knows a hard skill (skill and experience).

3. Experienced in similar projects (skill and experience).

4. Humility to learn required and new skills (attitude).

5. Ownership towards the job and outcomes (attitude).

Good talent comes at a “right” cost, knows “right” skills, has experience in “right” projects and has a “right” attitude. “Right” is subjective and changes based on business needs.

Now, let’s into it.

#1 Singapore has serious talent problem.

To understand Singapore’s talent problem, let’s look at this GPD per capita chart from Wikipedia. The chart by no means tells you that everyone in Singapore is rich. It gives you an indicative idea of purchasing power.

Singapore is richer than oil-rich Middle Eastern countries. When you compare at city level estimates for Seoul (USD 39K GDP PPP) and Tokyo (USD 49K GPD PPP), Singapore (an island city state) is still far richer.

Next look at home ownership. Singapore home ownership is almost 90%. Far higher than any other developed country (50-65% home ownership).

These facts translate into a society that’s rich and comfortable with “expectations” of improved living.

With this perspective in mind, here are some objective points which makes finding good talent a difficult affair.

1. Talent lacks digital market skill sets - The local market is saturated and dominated by offline players. This is unlike UK, which is dominated by online distribution channels. Key skills like performance marketing, social media marketing, and core software development is missing or expensive to afford here.

2. Lacking experience with large scale operations - Imagine setting up a website with a million visitors every day or every month. Such platforms do not exist here except a few (Shopee and Grab among few others). This translates into lack of talent that has built large companies.

3. Cost of talent and expectations - A fresh graduate starts at salaries of SGD 3.5K and above. Include CPF (pension fund) and that makes cost of talent as high as the USA. (the result of high cost of talent in USA = outsourcing)

4. Talent lacks international exposure - People do not want to work outside Singapore. This translates into a talent set that has not experienced building new products, services and business outside of this market. (life is good in SG, why would anyone want to work outside? - that’s creates the problem)

Combine these factors with the easy, cheap and experienced talent available all across Singapore - Malaysia, China, India, Indonesia and Bangladesh - and the situation becomes stark.

Let’s do a quick poll. Look at the picture below and give me your answer.

Before I move forward, please note this is by no means a criticism of local talent. My perspective is from building a DTC brand, with under 500K USD in funds. We need cheap, smart and excited talent to build the company from scratch.

#2 Lean talent system that worked for us

When we started building the brand, I had a full team - 5 members. Three months later I was left with 1 fulltime member. I needed to build a team from scratch, and this had to be done fast. So, I went about hiring a team of freelancers, agencies and flexible staff. I believe it has worked since we are significantly large in terms of revenues (key indicator of success) now.

Here is how I went about building the team. I essentially said - “no full-time hiring, only flexible and specific talent”.

1. Limited full-time staff - We don’t keep a large in-house team. For the longest time, there was only one full time staff apart from me. We recently brought in a second person to look after social media, after past efforts failed. Additionally, full-time staff have to wear multiple hats and multi task.

2. Full-time Interns - Singapore universities promote students to go for full-time internship. We reached out to autonomous universities, polytechnic colleges and also diploma to recruit interns to help with tasks. Till date, I have hired 4 interns - 1 is a rockstar, 2 are upcoming and 1 quit. They are eager to learn and output is quite good!

3. Freelancers are a hidden gem. Our developer is in Kuala Lumpur, customer service agent and support designer in Manila, and copywriter in Australia. Beyond this, I actively engage with freelancers on small project basis. This ensures I have a pool of resources to choose from.

4. Agencies - This has been tricky. Agencies in Singapore cost almost as much as in the USA with lots of restrictions on possible output. For small business, this agency cost does not work out. We have found cheaper agencies in Malaysia and India. However, agencies are a tricky bit - you have to find reliable partners. I have had bad experiences with agencies everywhere.

5. Flexible staff - Let’s just say this is our advantage. We have several brands and supporting team, such as creative, operations and purchasing, is shared. So we leverage them whenever necessary without putting the burden on one brand P&L.

6. Fresh Graduates - This is something new I am trying out. Fresh graduates are still affordable, ready to learn and grow. I am hoping this would work well.

#3 How to make lean teams effective?

This is how I try to make a lean team work.

1. Specialized tasks - Each person does something specific to their skill set. For example, I send screenshots, keywords and articles to our copywriter and she knows what to do next. Same for the designer - the task is sent today and output comes within 48 hours. For the developer, it is a one line text on Slack.
   Freelancers, agencies or staff who don’t understand required output from prompts (maybe an additional example) do not fit well into this system.

2. Tracking and reporting - Since everyone is working in their silos, it becomes important to track metrics and outputs regularly. For example, a designer’s metric is the quality and clarity of their designs. A performance marketing agency’s metric will be ROI on the advertising spend.

3. High ownership - Ownership means a person or team convert an information into output without handholding. They have to research, overcome challenges and provide the output. Hard work/smart work without output is meaningless for small growing companies. Our focus is to get the work done.

4. Low communication - I know “over-communication” is hyped as a way to build growing companies. I have found it to slow down outcomes, confuse team members and consume productive time. Hence, generally meetings are one to one. Entire team isn’t in an meeting except for the daily revenue and advertising performance tracking. I keep an atmosphere of “low-communication” focused on achieving outcomes each day.

5. Automation - It is crucial to automate everyday tasks. We have not been able to do it. We rely on people to “automate”. This will be next phase of changes in the team to make it more productive.

A lean specialized team could miss the bigger picture. Hence, I keep a look at the big picture view and navigate the team in the “required” direction.

That’s it from my side this week.

1. How else would you build a team in Singapore?

2. What could I do different from my current approach?

Would look forward to your comments.

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Thanks again for being a wonderful reader! It has been a pleasure writing for you. Please like 💖 and share 🎁 the post. It adds a ton of value to my weekly writings.

This was a Taylor Swift week in Singapore.

• Swift’s The Eras Tour had shows on 2, 3, 4 & 7, 8, 9 Mar 2024.

• Swifties took over streets, social media and news platforms.

• Neighbouring countries complained Singapore’s exclusive deal with Swift.

Look at this Instagram page of Strait Times, the leading publisher of SG. She took over the page!

Jisoo Fan Club

Taylor swift is not cute. Jisoo is the best. Look at her - she is pissed because I featured Taylor Swift today. 😨

I will see you guys next week. Have a great week ahead!